About

RISC-V support in the various toolchains is still a work in progress and can require bringing together source patches and non-default branches from multiple upstream projects. This creates a barrier for developers wishing to participate in expanding the RISC-V software ecosystem. Specifically, GCC won't have an official release with RISC-V autovectorization until gcc-14 (Spring 2024).

Imagination already produce packages for Windows, macOS and several Linux distributions which include bundled binaries of recent GCC and LLVM, packaged together with a small sysroot, support for a few CPUs (modelled and real hardware) and a VS Code IDE.

A single Catapult SDK package currently includes:

• LLVM, version 16.0
• GCC (13.1). We'd like to use the riscv/gcc-13-with-riscv-opts backport once stable (e.g. LTO had issues when we last looked)
• C libraries including Musl, picolib and glibc
• binutils
• A software CPU model of some Imagination CPUs
• Support (via OpenOCD and gdb) for debugging on a number of RISC-V platforms including HiFive1, VisionFive
• Documentation and example applications, including FreeRTOS
• A Visual Studio Code IDE that integrates all these features

This effort was to explore feasibility of providing binary toolchain releases.

Status

Updates

03 Aug 2023 

• Publicly available binaries now released without registration requirement

22 Jun 2023 

• Project reported as priority for 2H23